Thursday, October 18, 2007

Where the Brother Is Coming From

In New York City it's so easy to get caught up in the broad strokes of the brush that you sometimes forget to step in close and take in the details. It happened in the subway again, a place you're supposed to enter and exit as quickly as possible without getting mugged by fumes or fellow humans. If I had only observed it once, I might not have written about it; but it was once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. The AM incident involved an older looking black man who was standing by the turnstyle waiting for someone--another older looking black man. You got a swipe, the first one asked. Without even giving so much as the appearance of thinking about it, the second man took out his subway card and swiped the first one through. A word of thanks sent them on their ways. It was all so casual, I wasn't sure someone had just been taken for two dollars. Later in the PM, two younger black men repeated the scene. Same question, same swipe, but with a slightly different result: a point of the finger met with a nod of the head. I always wondered why black men were referred to as "brothers." It's not often you feel you understand in New York City. I couldn't understand why I wanted to be a black man in America.

2 comments:

I think you just explained why you might want to be a Black man by the story. Unfortunately, it is not always that way with Blacks towards each other, the same way that Jews don't always stand together, Whites, Chinese, Italians, etc. Once we start to remember that it is a matter of being human AND not a race, we might learn to slow down and be a little kinder to each other, no matter what color, creed or sex.

About Me

Those of us living with HIV are all too often relegated to an even deeper closet where we turn into something less than human--a statistic. With about one million HIV+ individuals in this country of 303,000,000, that comes out to about one in three hundred. I am one of them.